An SSD arrived earlier today that I thought all might like to read about.  A quick change of plans to the negative of a few and here we are taking pictures and benchmarking the new OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G 120GB SSD.  Having just completed testing, OWC gets a big thumbs up for being only the second manufacturer to release an SSD with SandForces new SF-2000 series SATA 3 processor as well as ensuring the '6G' is of the quality that we have come to appreciate.

The OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD is a SATA 3 solid state drive and available in capacities of 120, 240 and 480GB.  Initial pricing is expected to be in the area of $319.99 and $579.99 for the 120 and 240GB versions with the 480GB demanding a premium of $1799.  Performance for the 6G is equal for all capacities at 506MB/s read and 464MB/s write with 60,000 IOPS and .1ms disk access.

Today we are going to talk about QNAP's new generation two-bay Turbo NAS with iSCSI, especially designed for small business and home users who are looking for a large storage center. This solution supports RAID 1, offers hot-swappable hard disk design, features two eSATA and multiple USB ports.

We have looked at quite of few of Seagate's GoFlex drives and media products in the last year or so. From portable drives to desktop drives, and from networking systems to media players, each one has proven to be a very good performer. Their small footprint and interchangeable cabling system make them useful to just about everyone.

The best part of reviewing SSDs is the ever changing atmosphere and pace at which things progress. As a reviewer, one never knows what to expect until a SSD is in our hands and that certainly is the case with the Crucial M4 SATA 3 solid state drive. We were a bit surprised to learn that Crucials new consumer version SSD has now taken the branding of M4 vice following that of the C300 line of their former release.

For those unaware, Micron is Crucials parent company and will be retaining the C400 branding for their enterprise line of SSDs.  Admittedly, we couldn't resist benchmarking the M4 as quickly as it was received and we soon learned that the name change wasn't the only surprise we were in for.

The Seagate GoFlex Slim 320GB portable drive caught us a little off guard when it arrived. We weren't sure what to expect, but in the end we found ourselves pleasantly surprised to find a portable drive that was fast, lightweight, small and looked good. Usually, you can't find a way to blend all those features together without making sacrifices along the way, but that doesn't appear to be the situation we have here today. In order to take full advantage of this drive you really need to have a USB 3.0 interface! With CrystalDiskMark we saw the GoFlex Slim 320GB drive peak at ~120MB/s read and ~118MB/s write, so if you've been using a USB 2.0 drive and are stuck at ~31MB/s write speeds you'll see nice performance gains!

The Mach Xtreme MX-GX USB 3.0 Flash Drives offer incredible read speeds and come in 4 different flavours: 8GB, 16GB, 32GB or 64GB; they are also priced competitively, the 16GB model being found at CaseKing.de for about 29.90 Euros.

The OCZ Vertex 3 SSD is based on the second-generation SandForce's SF-2281 SATA 6Gb/s controller and maintains all of the original core technology introduced in the original SF-1200 series, but now improves SSD performance with 20% faster IOPS and 40% faster sequential read/write throughput. OCZ promises 60,000 IOPS at up to 550 MB/s transfer speeds with the Vertex 3 SSD, and Benchmark Reviews confirms that they're keeping this promise with tests of the new storage device on a B3-stepping Sandy Bridge platform against the Crucial RealSSD C400.